That's not a 'bug', it's the expected behavior of the current design and implementation. From the optimization overview (http://www.sqlite.org/optoverview.html

That's not a 'bug', it's the expected behavior of the current design and implementation. From the optimization overview (http://www.sqlite.org/optoverview.html http://www.sqlite.org/optoverview.html): The current implementation of SQLite uses only loop joins. That is to say, joins are implemented as nested loops. Know your tools.